This is a story of the first programmable computer to have come out of the Soviet Union and their genius inventor Sergey Lebedev.
Sergey Lebedev
When talking about the history of computers, we immediately think about Charles Babbage and his analytical and difference engines the invention of Punch Cards by Hermann Hollerith, the first and second generation computers like Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) or the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), but we don’t really talk about the MESM. Well, that changes now. Today we learn about the MESM, which roughly translates to Small Electronic Calculating Machine. It was the first universally programmable electronic computer in the Soviet Union and today, we learn about the man who was responsible for its creation and technical specifications about the machine itself.
Probably, one of the most underappreciated inventions of the post World War Two Soviet era, the MESM was developed under the supervision and direction of Sergey Lebedev, from the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in the Ukrainian SSR. However, before we talk about the technical specifications of the machine we will talk about the man himself, his career, and his path towards building Europe’s first fully programmable computer that no one ever talks about.
Lebedev was a scientist in his twenties when he was working at the All Union Engineering Institute in Moscow in some problems relating to electrical power grid stability. As an Electronic Engineer, one thing I can tell you is the calculations can get long and tedious and sometimes it is impossible to solve a problem without using complex computational software. So, Lebedev naturally felt the same while working in the thirties and was determined to do something about it.
In 1939, he received his doctorate for the development of “Artificial Stability of Electrical Systems”. Overall he worked from 1928 to 1946 at All Union Electrotechnical Institute in Moscow and Kiev. By this time, Lebedev was considered to be one of the greatest scientists produced by the Soviet Union.
Though his greatest work was done just after the second world war, the scientist demonstrated considerable interest in designing computational machines that could solve large and complex problems with relative ease. He realized pretty early on his career that the only way to solve computational problems were to build powerful and capable computational machines.
Lebedev tried his hand in binary arithmetic as well. His wife Alisa Grigorevna stated “In 1941, during the German aviation bombing raids on Moscow, Sergey closed himself in a windowless bathroom with a candle and a copybook and hours long was writing ‘ones and zeroes‘”.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and Lebedev along with every other scientists in the Union, started working towards the defense of Soviet Union, and this meant the work towards building the computer had to be halted (Screw you Hitler!). During the war, he worked upon stabilizing system for a tank gun, which allowed the accurate aiming of guns without having to slow the tank. Towards the end of the war, he designed an analog computer for solving of ordinary Differential Equations.
After the end of the war, everything in the Soviet Union was relocated and many Moskvich scientists were relocated to either Belarus or Ukraine. In 1946, Lebedev was appointed the director of Institute of Energetics at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and later on he would go onto become the director of Institute of Electrotechnics at the academy. This was where the 44 year old would go onto do his best work.
The cold war and specially the space race required the development of powerful machines which could solve complex mathematical questions and luckily for Soviet Union, they had the perfect man for the job, Lebedev.
By 1948, Lebedev had started regular work on the creation of MESM. For this, a complete set of mathematical operations to be performed needed to be defined. So Lebedev invited A.A. Dorodnitsin and K.A. Semendyaev, two of the leading physicists and mathematicians of the late forties. In 1949, the theoretical foundations of MESM were laid. He had assembled around two dozen crew comprising of the best scientists and mathematicians Soviet Union had to offer to make the MESM. The practical work started with composing general block structure that contained Central Arithmetic Unit, Memory Unit, Control Unit, Input and Output devices and some peripheral punch cards.
By the end of 1949, the design and basic structure of computer was already defined and in 1950, the MESM was assembled in Feofania, a suburb of Kiev and in true Soviet fashion under absolute secrecy.
The MESM and its technical specifications
Now that we have read about the man, let us try to understand the machine as well. Lebedev and his team had come to define the basic architectural principles which we know as von Newmann principles. However, the Soviet scientists had reached the results independently. The principles were
Computer contained arithmetic, memory, control and input output units.
Codes are stored in the same memory as processed numbers (data).
Binary System is implemented for number and statement coding.
Computations are performed automatically according to the stored program.
Logical computations were performed alongside arithmetic operations.
Computer memory is composed on hierarchical principles.
Numerical mathematical methods are implemented for solving various given problems.
Do not let the name Small Electronic Computing Machine fool you. This was a huge computer, with over 30 ft in length and 7 ft in height, and required an operating power of 25 KW. It was somewhat efficient and operated at a clock pulse of 5 KHZ and employed 6000 vacuum tubes to work as its Central Processing Unit (CPU). It could perform 3000 operations per minute.
THE MESM
The MESM was employed by the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1951 to 1957 and was finally dismantled in 1959. As for Lebedev, he moved onto the next one and worked on the development of BESM (Large Electronic Computing Machine), and several great projects including the Elbrus supercomputer, which are still used for nuclear researches, and space exploration programs. Lebedev passed away on July 3, 1974 in Moscow. He was posthumously, awarded Charles Babbage medal “Computer Pioneer” in 1996, for his contributions towards the development of computers.
The Cold war was a four and a half decade long conflict between The US and the USSR
The Cold War was the biggest and longest wang measuring contest between the Capitalist bloc The United States and the communist bloc the Soviet Union, who just wanted to get one over each other in anything and everything. The Cold War lasted from 1946 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The United States and USSR didn’t actually take up weapons to fight each other (apart from that one time in Cuba, when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro almost ended the world), but supported many major conflicts in the world. (Vietnam comes to mind). Overall the war was more ideological than anything else. Communism and capitalism mix as well as oil and water and neither of the parties wanted to let the other get the upper hand.
The Cold War was not all negative though. In fact, I believe it was the most significant time for the overall development of major technologies for both sides. Today, we look at the inventions that were made by the Soviets and in a follow up article we will talk about American inventions during the Cold War. So, let us begin. (I will leave the wikipedia links for all the inventors and some concepts, which I do not have the time to explain)
We start from the very beginning, 1947. This year 4 things were invented, that completely changed the world.
The Multistage Rocket
Multistage Rocket
A multistage rocket is a launch vehicle (these launch rockets into space), that has two or more stages with an engine and a propellant for each stage, and are crucial for the launch of any spacecraft. Russian scientists Mikhail Tikhonravov and Dmitry Okhotsimsky were responsible for the optimization of multistage rockets and helped immensely in increasing the range by dropping the parts of the construction.
The Mig–15
The Mig-15
The Mig – 15 was a jet fighter aircraft that managed to incorporate swept wings, and which almost reached supersonic level, which managed to wreck havoc in the Korean war, for a while. It is still used in some countries and is the most produced jet fighter, with over 18000 confirmed units.
The AK-47
The AK-47
The AK-47 needs no introduction. It is the most popular assault rifle in the world. It was created by the Russian inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov. The 47 in AK-47 refers to the year it was invented.
Such is the effectiveness and popular of the 47 that nearly seven decades later, this weapon still sees regular action in combat. A contender for one of the most significant invention during the cold war, for sure.
The Laser Microphone
Leon Theremin
We are only three years into a 45 year long conflict and we already have a surveillance and eavesdropping device. The laser microphone was a device that used a laser beam to detect sound vibrations in a distant object. This device was designed by Leon Theremin and was used extensively by the KGB to spy on French, British and American embassies in Moscow.
There was a very significant invention in 1949, which completely changed the way wars were fought. This was the Reactive Armour.
A reactive armour is a type of vehicular armour that reacts in such a way that it reduces the impact of weapons on the vehicle. It is crucial these days in all the military equipment and every single military uses a version of reactive armour, for their vehicles.
Now we move on to the fifties which were the most glorious time period for the development of science and technology in the Soviet Union. There was everything in this decade, ranging from the smallest of devices to the largest of spacecrafts.
Magnetotellurics
Andrey Nikolayevich Tikhonov
Okay, this is not exactly an invention, but a subsection of electromagnetics, however it warrants an entry all the same. Magnetotellurics is the electromagnetic geophysical method to calculate earth’s conductivity. I will only add that Magnetotellurics has been the heart and brains of various geological studies throughout the years and as a result we know more about our planet. This invaluable method was introduced by Andrey Tikhonov, one of the greatest geologists of all time in the 1950’s.
MESM – Small Electronic Calculating Machine
MESM and Krainickyi at the control desk
MESM was built in Ukraine in 1951, at the laboratory of computing technologies of the Institute of Electric Engineering of the Academy of Sciences in Ukraine SSR. The lead inventor was Sergey Alekseevich Lebedev. It is a crying shame that we are not taught about this machine while learning about the history of computers. This computer and Lebedev both have a history ranging back to World War Two and it is fascinating to read about this somewhat overlooked machine. (I will write a separate piece on MESM and Lebedev soon.)
MASER
The First MASER and the inventor Charles H Townes
MASER stands for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and is a device that produces microwave signals by stimulated emission and is used extensively in atomic clocks as timekeeping devices and in deep space exploration ground stations. MASERS were also crucial in the discovery of LASER. The first Maser was invented by Charles H Townes , an American scientist, but the theoretical concepts were proposed by Soviet physicists Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov in 1952. This was the first major act of collaboration between the scientists of both the US and the USSR and for this great invention won Townes, Basov and Prokhorov the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.
Nuclear Power Plant
Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant. Now a museum.
The Soviets were the first to make a nuclear power plant connected to the power grid. On 27 June 1954, the Nuclear Power plant in Obninsk started producing electricity and connected it to the grid. The power plant was located around 70 miles southeast of Moscow. It only produced 5 MW of electricity, but that is not relevant. What is relevant is the fact it was the first one to actually produce electricity and it was done before the Americans. The brains behind this nuclear power plant was the director of Soviet Atomic Bomb Project, the infamous nuclear scientist Igor Kurchatov.
The MiG – 21
The MiG-21, the most produced Supersonic fighter jet of all time, had a top speed of over 2000 km/ hr
A year after Obninsk, the Soviets produced the supersonic jet fighter MiG-21, which is the most produced supersonic aircraft of all time. Though it was first invented in 1955, it is still extensively used by the Indian, Croatian and Romanian Air Forces. It is also used to launch NanoLaunch, to lauch suborbital rockets from the pacific ocean. What a beast of a plane, the MiG-21 is.
The Tokamak
The Tokamak T-4
The Tokamak was built in 1955, but the first experiment was done only in 1968. The Tokamak is a magnetic confinement device that is used to produce controlled nuclear fusion. It is widely believed that if we ever manage to tame nuclear energy, the Tokamak will have a large role to play.
The Spaceport
The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the first and largest spaceport in the World
A spaceport, much like an airport is a site for launching and receiving spacecrafts. The Baikonur Cosmodrome, currently located in Kazakhstan is the first spaceport in the world. The spaceport is the largest in the world and is leased by the Russian government until 2050. This spaceport has seen a lot of action including the launch of Sputnik-1 and Vostok 3KA-3, which took Yuri Gagarin into space.
The Sputnik – 1
A replica of Sputnik – 1
The big one, the biggest one of them all, the Sputnik-1 became the first artificial satellite to be launched into orbit on 4th October 1957, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and changed the history of the world and of the universe to some extent. This was such a huge win for the Soviets, that its importance can be hardly overstated. Americans were not that far behind, for they launched the Explorer-1, less than six months from this incident, but only one can be first, and it was the Sputnik-1. On a side note, this was one of the main agendas of John F. Kennedy, during his presidential election which ultimately got him elected. Considering how it all turned out, Sputnik-1 can be cited as one of the factors, that shaped the twentieth century and beyond.
Luna -1
A replica of the Luna – 1
Luna – 1 was the first object launched to reach the moon and in typical Soviet fashion, it missed its mark by around 6000 kilometres and became the first object to reach the heliocentric orbit. It also became the first man made object to have a velocity higher than the escape velocity of the earth.
There were other inventions in the fifties, which we are forced to miss out. Some of these were Ternary computers, missile boats and the staged combustion cycle, but we still have nearly four decades of inventions to go through so we leave the fifties for now.
Vostok – 1 and Yuri Gagarin
Launch of the Vostok-1, the first human manned spacecraft
The Soviets did not slow down in the sixties and a lot of inventions related to rockets and space exploration were invented. Some of these include space suits and space food. All of these culminated in the Vostok-1, which became the first spacecraft to carry a human aboard. Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet Air Force pilot became the first person to travel to space.
The Tsar Bomba
The Tsar Bomba Mushroom Cloud
Only one of these were ever created and there is a very good reason why. The Tsar Bomba, was tested on 30 October 1961, and the blast shook the entire world. This got everyone talking and speculations were made on how much of these did the communists actually possess, and would they use them. It was the most powerful man made explosive ever created and by a long way. It had a blast yield of 50 Megatons, for context the bomb dropped at Hiroshima had a blast yield of 15 Megatons. Watch this video to understand the political chaos it caused and the actual chaos it would have caused, had the Soviets detonated this in the middle of a city.
Ekranoplan (Ground Effect Vehicles)
Ekranoplan
A ground effect vehicle (ekranoplan) was designed to attain sustained flight over a level surface making use of ground effect. This was also known as the flying boat or the flarecraft. They are typically intended to fly over water like a flying boat and some of them could operate over flat plains like glacier lakes or smooth plateaus.
The MiL Mi-8
The Mil Mi-8
The Mil Mi-8 was originally produced in 1961, and is the most produced helicopter in the world. It has both military and civilian applications and still is being produced today. This helicopter was way ahead of its time and had a top speed of 225 km/hr, and weighed less than 7000 kilograms which is impressive even for today’s standards.
Druzhba pipeline
A surface region of the Druzhba pipeline
in 1964, the Druzhba pipeline was constructed. This is an oil pipeline that stretches around 4000 kilometres from Eastern Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany and Czech Republic making it the longest oil pipeline in the world.
Spacewalk
Alexei Leonov
In 1965, Alexei Leonov , a Soviet air force general became the first person to perform a spacewalk. On 18 March 1965, he exited the capsule during Voskhod-2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds, making him the first person to walk in space.
Proton Rocket
The launch of the Zvezda service module of the International Space Station on a Russian Proton-K rocket.
The Proton is a launch vehicle which can only be used once and is the most popular heavy lift launch rocket of all time. It was first launched in 1965, and to this day we have not found an alternative as effective as the Proton. It was used to launch both military and commercial satellites.
Luna-9
Luna -9, a replica
In 1966, the Soviet space engineer, Georgy Babakin launched the Luna-9, which was the first lander spacecraft. Lander spacecrafts make a soft landing on a celestial body, which ensures that they remain functional. To achieve this remarkable feat, the Luna-9 used airbags to cushion the landings. This was yet another win for the communists in the space race. Also this year, Luna-10 became the first orbiter spacecraft to be launched.
Yakovlev Yak-40
Yakovlev Yak-40
A regional jet is a jet engine which carries less than 100 passengers. The Yak-40 became the first regional jet to take flight, on 21 October 1966. It was a 3 engine beast and carried 32 passengers. Such is the popularity of this jet that even though production ceased in 1981, some companies in Russia and Ukraine still operate it.
There are two more inventions of the sixties, which we need to talk about. The first one is Mil V-12.
The Mil V-12
The MiL V-12 was the largest helicopter ever invented, and it took to the skies for the first time on 10 July 1968. I mean just look at how gargantuan it is. It was supposed to be a heavy lift vehicle but never got out of the prototype stage, such a shame. But, the Soviets can still say that they built the largest helicopter in the world.
The Tupolev Tu-144
The Tupolev Tu-144
Most commonly known as “The Soviet Concorde” the Tu-144 actually took first flight before the British- French Concorde. It took its maiden flight on 31 December 1968, but it was 1975 before this supersonic jet was introduced for the public. This was a flawed supersonic jet and did not last very long, but no matter what it is still the first supersonic passenger jet.
The Seventies, Eighties and the Nineties
Radial keratotomy
Radial Keratotomy is a refractive surgical procedure, to correct nearsightedness (myopia). It was developed in the 70’s by Soviet ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fyodorov. Though the procedure has now been discarded for new and developed procedures, this had restored the eyesight of thousands of people in the USSR.
Excimer laser
Excimer Laser
In 1970, Nikolai Basov, the guy who won the Nobel Prize for MASERS in 1964, along with V. A. Danilychev and Yu. M. Popov, invented the excimer laser. This laser is used extensively in eye surgeries and to produce extremely precise microelectronic circuits. If you’ve ever visited an ophthalmologist, you’ll know what this is.
Luna – 16
Luna – 16
The Luna-16 was launched on 12 September 1970 and was the first sample collecting robotic probe and returned to earth with a sample of lunar soil. I have written it a few times, and I will write it again. Yet another victory in the space race for the Soviet Union.
Space Rover– Lunokhod-1
Lunkokhod-1
A space rover is an exploration device, that roams on the celestial body. The Luokhod-1 was the first space rover launched on 10 November 1970, and it could move freely on the moon’s surface. It operated on the moon’s surface for 321 days, covering a total distance of 10.54 kilometres.
The first space station
Salyt – 1
A space station is a spacecraft that supports a human crew for an extended period of time. Salyut -1 became the first space station of any kind. It was designed by the missile engineer Vladimir Chelomey. It was launched into Low Earth Orbit on April 19, 1971, and returned on October 11, 1971, and housed 3 crew members.
Underwater Assault Rifle
The Underwater Assault Rifle
Vladimir Simonov designed the first underwater assault rifle in 1975, and the role it has played in subsequent wars is something everyone one of us already know.
Kirov-class battlecruiser
Kirov Class Battlecrusier
In 1977, the Soviet navy constructed the Kirov Class Battlecruiser, which were and still are the heaviest combatant warships active in the world. This is another Soviet invention that has lasted a long time and their size is comparable to the battleships of World War One, which were huge.
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
IBCM
The seventies had the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, designed by Alexander Nadiaradze in 1976. These are generally used to carry nuclear warheads, and the prospect of one of these striking one of their enemies is still a huge fear in political circles.
The Typhoon Class Submarine
The Typhoon Class Submarine
This is the largest submarine ever built. It was 175 metres long, and had a submerged water displacement of 48,000 tonnes, and traveled at a rate of 52 km/ hr. This is among humanity’s greatest inventions and to learn more about the Typhoon class, watch this video.
The Tupolev Tu-160
Tupolev Tu-160
On December 18 1981, the Tupolev Tu-160 took its first flight. It was a supersonic variable sweep wing heavy bomber designed in the 1970’s. It is the largest and heaviest combat fighter, the fastest bomber and the largest variable sweep supersonic aircraft of all time.
MiR Space Station
MiR space Station
It as assembled from 1986 to 1996. It was the first modular space station, and it was the largest artificial satellite in space. It served as a micro-gravity research laboratory and researches in biology, physics, astronomy and other experiments regarding the permanent occupation of space. The International Space Station replaced it as the largest satellite in space.
The Mir Submersible
The Mir submersible
Mir Submersible was a self propelled deep submergence vehicle developed in the eighties. It was created in collaboration with Finland and was used in several high profile expeditions including filming for the Titanic and the Bismark. They also went below the north pole and are used in a two year expeditions to Lake Baikal.
The RD-170
The RD- 170 engine
The Soviets designed the most powerful liquid fuel engine, the RD- 170 engine. This was among the last great inventions of the Soviet era.
The Spaceplane – Buran
Buran
A spaceplane is an aerospace vehicle which flies like a spacecraft in vacuum and like an aircraft in the earth’s atmosphere. The Buran was the first spacecraft ever created taking flight on November 15 1988. Buran was the last statement of intent from the soviets regarding the space race.
So, that was a pretty impressive list of inventions from the Soviet Union during the cold war. The Cold War had a reputation for being a forerunner in developing new technologies and getting the upper hand over each other. There has not been a time where so many new technologies were developed and perfected as they were during the cold war. We will move over to the Americans and see what magic they created during these four and a half decades.
Conspiracy Theories, can’t live without them, can’t live with them either. They exist in all shapes, ways and forms. These conspiracy theories can range all the way from your bedroom to the edge of the universe. You have of course, heard about Flat Earthers, and Lizard people, and I am not going to go over them today. I wanted to take a look at some of the more sinister, funny and maybe lesser known theories which made me laugh, sneer or just made me swear at the stupidity on display. Let us go down the rabbit hole.
Theory no 1- Chemtrails
A Jet leaving a Water Condensation Trail, or Contrail.
Where do I begin to talk about this. This is one of the most bizarre conspiracy theories that I have had the misfortune to research about. I can’t tell what irks me more, the theory itself or the number of people that believe in this idiocy.
Supporters of chemtrails conspiracy theory believe that the chemtrails are chemical and biological agents that are sprayed by jets to harm the general public. There have been a large sects of people that believe chemtrails release solar radiation, play a major part in weather manipulation, psychological manipulation, population control, biological and/ or chemical warfare, and frankly everything else under the sun.
Of course, there is no evidence that chemtrails are any different from the vapor contrails, that are released by high altitude aircraft. The long streak of vapor trails are just vapor trails and not a biological weapon, for crying out loud. In 2016, the Carnegie Institute of Science published a peer reviewed paper on chemtrails, which interviewed 77 atmospheric chemists and out of them 76 of them stated that there is no evidence for the existence of chemtrails. Try explaining this to the theorists though.
Theory no 2 – Global Warming and Climate Change are a Hoax
As someone in the STEM circle, this is the one that frustrates me the most. There are a huge amount of people and prominent people in power who state that global warming and all the scientific evidence that come with it are absolute hoax. The anti global warming army believes that global warming and climate change are invented and distorted for financial and political reasons. This has gone beyond the realms of just conspiracy theory and has become a part of mainstream politics.
The allegations have been made that scientists are a part of large conspiracy theory, who are conspiring to fund their hoax researchers and rob the taxpayers of their money. Never mind the ice melting in the arctic, the continuous rise of the sea level, extinction and probable extinction of polar animals and other adverse effects that global warming is causing, these people will not budge from their stance.
I for one, can’t see why anyone would deny climate change and global warming. It must be evident that the average temperature of the earth is on the rise and it is creating negative consequences, which might be irreversible, but well common sense is not so common after all.
Theory no 3- Finland Does not exist
Map of Finland
This is something I found out whilst researching this article, but was too good to not be included. There is a small part of the internet that does not believe that Finland is not a physical place. No, seriously I am not making this up.
This theory states that the USSR and Japan shared a secret about the stretch in the Baltic sea between Sweden and Russia, falsely stating that there is a land called Finland where the Japanese and the Soviets fish as much as they pleased without worrying about any international laws.
When asked about how do they account for almost 6 million people live in Finland, or how do we actually get to travel to Finland. Well idiot, you are not actually travelling to Finland but some parts of Russia, Sweden and Estonia and of course, the government is lying to you.
The theorists have not been able to say how anyone can see Finland from all the satellite images and the airplanes, apart from the obvious “Government is lying to us”. This is one of the most absurd theories out there.
Theory no 4 – The “Hollow Earth” Theory
Our beautiful and not hollow planet, Earth
This theory is even older than the flat earth theory, and just as preposterous. The gist of the theory is that the Earth is entirely hollow or contains an interior space. It was suggested by Edmund Halley, the one after whom Halley’s comet is named, who proposed this might be a theory, but was disproved by Charles Hutton in his Schiehallion experiment.
This was not the end of this conspiracy theory however. This entered the realms of conspiracy theory, once it was disproved and people have run with this theory for years. One of the main factors that promote this theory, indirectly and to a small extent is the conept of Paatala in Hinduism. It is one of the most common theme in many religious scriptures in the oldest religion.
It is the concave hollow earth theory believers that are the absurd ones. This theory states that instead of living on the surface of the earth, we live inside the earth, and everything in the Universe also lies inside this surface. This theory was propagated by a New York doctor Cyrus Teed, who called this theory “Cellular Cosmogony”. There has been a plethora of fictional works which have supported this theory, and some of the fellow residents of this planet are only too happy to accept those as facts.
Theory 5 – HIV / AIDS, Richard Nixon and the CIA
Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States
Richard Nixon is definitely not the most popular president of the United States. He was accused of numerous scandals throughout his political career, and one of these scandals, (Watergate, of course) got him to resign from the presidency, the only president to do so. The conspiracy theory that I will talk about here is extremely bizarre, even for someone of Nixon’s reputation.
There is this theory going on for decades that Nixon and the CIA were responsible for the laboratory preparation of HIV/ AIDS to wipe out the African Americans, homosexuals, and other minority groups. A major factor for this is that AIDS was first discovered in the states in 1981, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974 was somewhat fresh in the minds of the American public.
This conspiracy theory attracted a lot of high profile supporters, including Thabo Mbeki, who was the president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008. Mbeki said in a Time Magazine interview regarding the AIDS theory “disputing scientific claims that the virus originated in Africa and accusing the States government of manufacturing the disease in military labs”. A Nobel prize winning scientist Wangari Maathai is also a supporter of this theory.
None of the scientists who have ever worked in this field agree to the theory however, and the general consensus is that the virus jumped form monkeys to human in the Congo, sometime in the early thirties.
That is all I have to write about these theories today. There are of course millions of conspiracy theories and I will definitely come back to them later. The next article on conspiracy theories or pseudoscience will be taking one of these concepts and debunking them with scientific facts.
Chem-trails: One of the most widely accepted pseudo science theories.
Less than a month ago, one of my relatives texted me on Facebook. It was about how homeopathy can cure the coronavirus. For a moment, I thought the old woman was joking but no, she was serious. I wanted to give her a good talking to, but then I remembered, no matter what the elders are always correct, right. After all, I did not want to waste my mental energy on someone who would not listen to criticism about their preconceived notion.
Well, since I am in lockdown with too much time on my hands, I went down this rabbit hole of fake science. I knew there were a few weirdos like my old relative who would believe in things like the earth is flat, we are hiding aliens in Area 51 , Australia is not a real physical place, Jack Dorsey is a robot and so on. What I did not know was the sheer volume of people who actually subscribed to these philosophies. I was laughing like a maniac reading about these theories before I realized that these were real people with voting rights.
Then I got a bit serious and wanted to learn more about how these ideas originate and what made people believe in these things. I read tens of articles, watched many hours of videos and also read one or two books on these topics. (I seriously read a 300 page book on why the earth is flat). I also read some great books which went into great details about why people believe in these things. (Recommendation: Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer).
As a result, I have learnt a thing or two about how people get sucked into believing these things and more importantly how can we detect and correct the pseudosciences as best as we possibly can. The thing is, it is not possible for me to write everything in this article. So, this is just the first post out of many regarding pseudoscience.
In this first part, we will talk and learn about what can and cannot be considered as pseudoscience, discuss some of their characteristics and how they originate. In the upcoming articles, we will learn about the most common and outrageous theories and how can we not get sucked into it.
A Very Lengthy Introduction, let’s not waste any more time.
The Scientific Method is a method of research in which a hypothesis is tested by a carefully documented repeatable results that can be verified by a large number of experts.
Pseudoscience literally refers to False science. These are the practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual, but that are not proven scientifically and have no basis in reality. By definition, pseudosciences do not confirm to the scientific method.
There are many different types of pseudoscience that it is not possible to state all their characteristics, but they all have some things in common. Let’s have a look at some of these traits.
The ideas are rigid and set in stone:- A person who believes in flat earth will not be convinced that the earth is actually spherical, a person who believes in homeopathy will not entertain the notion that it may be a hoax. They are not open to new ideas and can’t be moved.
The ideas are often exaggerated:- The testimonials these people give are so bizarre and so outrageous that you are left open mouthed and double check what you are reading. I am not kidding when I tell you that one alternative medicine enthusiast made a video about how a particular type of grass juice would cure all your medical ailments including cancer.
They are not open to criticism:- Pseudoscience is a angry teenager with an attitude problem. If you criticize them, you are threatening them. You can be an expert with two PHD’s in that field, you criticize them, you are against them, or more than likely you belong to the other group who believes in other pseudoscience.
They selectively filter out the inconvenient results:- If the results are not favorable, they simply do not exist. So, your alternative medicine worked on the 5 out of 50000 people you sold it to. Let conveniently ignore the 49995 people for whom it did not work upon.
Non repeatable results:- You cannot repeat the same results consistently enough to prove that they work.
Peer Review or the lack thereof:- For a scientific theory to see the light of day, the amount of scrutiny it has to go through is huge. Every proven scientific theory has gone through painstaking amount of peer review and been scrutinized left, right and center. Pseudoscience on the other hand still operate on hypotheses which have not been proven and no peer review has been conducted.
Those were some of the characteristics of pseudoscience, but they are not limited to these few I listed. To further study their characteristics, we have to dive into the realms of conspiracy theories, which I will do in the upcoming articles. For now, let us try to answer the question “How does pseudoscience originate?”
We need to understand that drawing the line between science and pseudoscience is not always clear and obvious. The demarcation process is very difficult and sometimes downright impossible. So, it is not uncommon for pseudoscience to pass on as actual science. Most of the pseudosciences originate because people simply do not understand what the actual science means, and try to interpret the theories in their own terms. Then it gets spread like wildfire and will deviate more and more from the truth.
The history of pseudoscience is almost as old as the history of humankind. Our ancestors in the stone age had their beliefs which helped them survive and live in a society, and gave them something to worship and keep faith in. A good example of this is astrology, which our cave dwelling forefathers practiced in some form. Religion, has an integral part to play as well in the pseudosciences not only surviving, but also thriving. Every religion has their own pseudosciences and their followers and disciples who will not budge from their preconceived notion of any theories, and these transfer from generation to generation.
Some pseudosciences which take the form of conspiracy theories start out as a joke, the idea of lizard people is one such example. These are mostly the result of bored individuals and social media, spreading the message like wildfire and getting a lot of traction. There are over a million of these theories and I will get to some of them soon.
That is all I have in this first article, I know I have not gone into details of everything and not explained these theories in details, but I will do so in the upcoming articles. Buckle up ladies and gentlemen, for I have decided to dive head first into this weird and wacky world of fake science. The next article will be on some of the most outrageous science related conspiracy theories of all time.
This is the second part of the wireless communication history series. The last post described the history of communications systems, starting from history of electromagnetic waves to Transatlantic wireless communication in 1909. Five short years after that, the first world war broke out.
The first world war is significant for a variety of reasons, it was the greatest war in history with fighting all across the world, in the land, in the seas and even in air. Millions of soldiers and civilians fought in the war and to communicate with each other, a variety of communication devices were used. We will take a look at some of the most prominent ones that shaped the communication between the generals and the front line troops in “The Great War”.
When the war officially started on 28th July 1914, both the Allied and the Central Powers were not too interested in improving the communication systems, because both sides believed that the war would be over by Christmas 1914. Even if they started making new technologies, it would take longer than Christmas of that year to bring them to the world.
As a result, the development of technologies were gradual and slow. There was and still is no way to foretell how long a war will last and it was not clear that what products and services would be necessary to communicate during the war. It was assumed that the simple devices like semaphore lamps, and telegraphy would be enough for tactical communications, as well as to communicate in the battlefields. Both sides would get a reality check very soon.
Then, communication technology got a lot of innovative ideas and advancements as hopes of a quick war was quashed. This led to the use of developed technologies like radio. Let us learn about some of them below.
Telegraphs and Telephone
Telephones In World War One
These were the most widely used form of communications during the great war. The British were using telegraphs for long distance communications and telephones to communicate in the front. The real breakthrough came when telephone lines were made more secure, and it was not easy to tap into the wire to listen to opponents’s plan.
It was easy enough to lay the wires down the ground, but these would be easily destroyed by shellfire and other explosives. However, wires that were buried 6 ft or lower were relatively safe from being damaged. Information security was a big priority for both parties. It was a matter of pride when you could intercept the signals and hinder the enemy plans.
The major problems with telegraphs and telephones were that they were intercepted very easily and sometimes when they were destroyed, it took runners hours to take important messages to and from the front, rendering the reports useless.
Not that, the central or the allied powers did not try to develop complex networks, but these always failed when attacked, and there is only so many times you can repair a telephone wire. This proved one important thing, wireless communication systems were becoming a necessity.
Signal Lamps
Signal Lamps In World War One
Also called as Aldis Lamp or Morse Lamp, the signal lamp was a visual signaling device that was used for optical and visual communication using Morse Code. These were mostly used on naval ships and airport control towers.
During Trench warfare in the First World War, German signals used three different types of optical morse transmitters which could transmit up-to 8 km using red filters for undetected communications.
These visual signals were restricted by one’s line of sight. They sent a focused signal into another lamp, which were at a distance. In large models, this is achieved by opening and closing shutters in front of a lamp using a manually operating switch. These were very helpful when stealth was of vital importance.
Heliograph was also used as signal lamp, which relayed messages using flashing dots and dashes, these used sunlight instead of electricity. It was useful for instantaneous optical communications over long distances and was used in overland campaigns, where the terrains were not a problem.
Radio
WW1 Radio- Marconi Trench Set
During the start of World War One, radio was still in its infancy. After all, it had not even been a decade since Marconi proved wireless communication existed, and only five short years since Transatlantic communication took place. The equipment were primitive, had a very limited range and was completely hindered by atmospheric interference. The most cutting edge radio had a range of less than 3000 yards.
Like everything back then, the radio used vacuum tubes, that were heavy and bulky. So moving them around the front lines were a huge pain. Hooking them up on horses were a big hassle too. Many techniques were improvised, but these radios in the early 1910’s presented more disadvantages than advantages.
During the war, radios were not as reliable as telephones or telegraphs in the fields, but there was one place where radio was king. The open sea. Navy Radios became some of the most developed communication technology and were superior in every respect to the one used in land and in air. So, they were able to relay wartime news to sea. Radio at sea was so important that the final dispatch of war, announcing armistice on November 11, 1918 was announced via radio.
So, these were some of the common ways in which military communicated in the great war. There were other ways of communication too, like the signal flags, semaphore, the phonetic alphabet and even animal messengers which deserve an article on their own. Just reading about them, we can see how far communication technology has come in the last century, and one can only imagine what the next 100 years will bring.
The next article will talk about the developments of technologies in the interwar period. That is all I have for today, thank you for stopping by.
Let me make this clear this straight away, this article will not be about how the hardware of mobile phones has evolved over the past or talk about one specific company. What it will describe is the technologies that are as simple as reflection and refraction of an electromagnetic wave to technologies like 4G and 5G. In the first part, we will learn about the theoretical concepts that led to wireless communications and in the parts that follow we will learn more about how we got to where we are, so let us begin. If we are to understand properly how we ended up with the technologies we have in cellular communications, we need to go as far back as the seventeenth century. I will try to arrange the history in chronological order but it might not always be possible.
Christian Huygens
In 1678, the Dutch mathematician Christian Huygens demonstrated the phenomenon of light reflection and refraction. He proposed a model in which every point of a wavefront may be regarded as a source of wave originating from the point. Read about Huygens’s Principle here.
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Over a hundred years later, in 1819, a French mathematician Augustin-Jean Fresnel improved upon Huygens’s work and was the first to demonstrate the wavelike nature of light, which along with Thomas Young’s Double Slit Experiment was crucial in our understanding of light.
Michael Faraday
We now come to the father of electricity himself. Michael Faraday was not a typical scientist, who came from riches in the eighteenth to nineteenth century. He had received very little formal education. In 1830’s he proposed the famous laws of electromagnetic induction. Problem was he was unable to prove the laws mathematically, and was not taken seriously initially.
James Clerk Maxwell
That all changed when James Clerk Maxwell, in 1864 successfully introduced the concept of Electromagnetic Waves, wave equations. He basically took the laws propagated by Faraday and proved it with mathematical equations which are known to us these days as Maxwell’s Equations.
Let us talk about Guglielmo Marconi,the father of Radio
Everyone who has gone through a science class has heard about Guglielmo Marconi. The Bologna born inventor was the first to prove wireless communications could be possible over a long distance.
Marconi was obsessed with wireless communications from a very young age. At age 20, he was interested in proving the existence of the invisible waves as discovered by Hertz and in 1896, he realized that waves can travel over a large distances by demonstrating it on a setup over a mile apart. With this newfound knowledge he traveled to Britain and had build a wireless station 12 miles apart. He also set up a wireless station on the isle if Wight which allowed Queen Victoria to communicate with Prince Edward who was aboard the royal yacht.
By 1899, Marconi’s signals had crossed the English Channel. He went to the United States and began working on his lifelong project, Transatlantic Wireless Communication. For this he set up a very powerful wireless station at Poldhu, Cornwall and also on the South Wellfleet on the American side, but his Cornwall station was destroyed on 17th September of that year by a gale, so a temporary one was established on its place. The temporary one was not as strong as the original one and the American one was established on St. John’s, Newfoundland.
On December 12 1901, Marconi and his assistant George Kemp were able to receive faint signals of Morse signals of the letter S, which conclude that their transatlantic project was successful. This can be considered to be one of the most important discoveries in the field of wireless communication, and it won Marconi won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909.
We are now at a point where we need to dive into military history to understand the development of communication systems and the impact they caused in this world. That will be addressed in Part Two of this article. This is all for today.
The utilization of Bandwidth has always been one of the most important and issues of Network and Telecom Engineering. There is not a single cellular company or an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who haven’t tried to make the most out of the bandwidth they have been given and every year, hundreds of millions if not over a billion dollars are spent in creating new and unique techniques for Bandwidth Utilization. The question arises why are these companies so willing to spend a ton of money in making the most out of the little bandwidth they have been assigned rather than buying more bandwidth. It is so because buying more bandwidth is much more expensive than the money that goes towards the research and development of different multiplexing and other bandwidth utilization techniques.
Bandwidth is the difference between the upper frequency limit and the lower frequency limit. Most of the bandwidth that we use lies in the Radio Waves or the microwave region. This is a very limited frequency range and those who wish to buy it do so by paying a hefty sum.
One of the major reasons for bandwidth to be extremely expensive has to do with reliability. It is common knowledge that wireless signals are much more susceptible to interference than a signal that is transmitting through a wired medium. The Radio Frequency Range has trillions of bytes of information floating in the air and if this information is to be tapped and intercepted, there can be dire consequences for everyone concerned. Bandwidth cannot be sold to those parties who do not have the resources or the technology to ensure that the information traveling is extremely secured and will not be intercepted. This means the parties who are in charge of ensuring bandwidth security, have to work very hard in ensuring that the information traveled across a channel is safe and they spend a lot of money to ensure signal security. Hence, reliability is a major cause for bandwidth being very expensive.
Security and reliability are not the only factors for bandwidth being expensive, it is merely a section of the bigger picture. The other reason that makes bandwidth expensive is that the stages and the processes required for bandwidth to reach an individual’s phone or router are immense. One can picture bandwidth to be a river and the concerned ISP’s to be small canals drawing water out of the river. The water from the river has to go through different stages of filtration and purification before reaching your reservoir, the same can be considered to be true for bandwidth. The costs incurred to bring bandwidth into the homes of internet users is just way too much and the end customers are required to pay for each step either directly or indirectly, making bandwidth extremely expensive.
One needs to realize the fact that the government or any parties concerned with the management of bandwidth do not assign the entire available bandwidth to the civilian public. There are reserved bands, which are not available for general access and are mostly used for military and government purposes. Government are forced to allocate this separate band because they need to keep most of the confidential information as secure as possible. So the vendors that provide the internet bandwidth to the customers are forced to fight for whatever bandwidth remains after it has been assigned to military and other confidential purposes. It is not difficult to imagine the competition among companies to get a spectrum. The government generally conducts the auction and often the bids can range in the millions. Bandwidth is a winner take all market.
Another very important reason for the high cost of bandwidth, we should understand the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and their hierarchies. There are three levels of Internet Service Providers, conveniently named Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 2 ISP’s respectively. All 3 serve their own significant purposes and go a long way in answering this question related to bandwidth. Tier 1 networks are those networks which can reach any other network in the world without any settlement. Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other tier 1 networks without having to pay any fees. Tier 1 networks do not need to purchase IP transit or pay for peering to any other networks without having to pay for any other networks, meaning Tier 1 ISP’s have supreme authority over the internet and the bandwidth.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 networks generally have to pay the Tier 1 networks for transmitting their traffic through other networks. Tier 1 generally possesses most of the physical networks and all the interconnections to carry out most of the lines themselves and even if they don’t they borrow from other Tier 1 ISP’s for free and vice versa. Some of the most renowned Tier 1 ISP’s are AT &T, CenturyLink, Sprint, Telia Carrier and so on. They generally charge large amount of money to Tier 2 and Tier 3 ISP’s to borrow some of their network and as a result the cost of bandwidth is significantly raised.
These are some of the main reasons why bandwidth is an extremely expensive commodity for most parties concerned. What can be concluded is that bandwidth is not an easy thing to manage. A lot of effort and resources go into the propagation of bandwidth. These are the collective efforts of scientists, researchers and other technical and non-technical personnel from all around the world and it is a topic which needs continuous research which requires huge sum of money. These are the reasons which make Bandwidth a very expensive commodity. With the Radio Frequency range getting more and more congested, the price of bandwidth can only go up. The good news is that we have been making the best use of the available bandwidth and new and improved techniques are being developed each and every day.
Cellphones are a part of everyday life. An average household has more number of cellphones than it has people. There are approximately eight billion active mobile phones in the world, and if you compare them from a decade ago, they have come a long way. These days, there are not many things that you will be unable to accomplish with a cellphone. This does not mean that they are fool proof and they do have their own limitations, none more so than not being to operate in places where proper network coverage is not available.
If you have taken a rural hike or taken your four wheel drive deep into the wilderness, you will find that your cellphone has no network coverage. While it may be a good idea to go out on an isolated trip sometimes, you might want to have an emergency backup means of communication, should things go south. A system that has got you covered in the most rural of terrains and worst environmental conditions. Such a system does exist and is widely in use as satellite phones.
Satellite phones works as the name suggests. A mobile communication device that connects to other phones by radio through satellites orbiting the earth and not by the usual terrestrial towers. No matter where you may find yourself in the world, there is at least a single satellite providing coverage to the earth. Let us actually get to the nuances and working of the system.
The above figure shows the way satellite phones operate.
A satellite phone, is a radio transceiver that sends the signal directly from a satellite using the L- band.
When you turn on a satellite phone, the signal goes to any number of registered satellite in a constellation. In case of communication with a normal cellular system, the signal gets reflected back to the earth and the ground stations on earth, reroute and switch the calls rather than the satellite themselves and then they are re- routed to a PSTN or a cellular network.
Being in the L- band (1-2 GHz), the transmitter frequency lies at around 1.6 GHZ ans receiver frequency lies at about 1525 – 1559 MHZ.
Satellite phones work well with geostationary as well as low earth orbits. Let us understand these orbits, a little bit more.
Geostationary and Geosynchronous Orbits
Geosynchronous satellites rotate in geosynchronous orbits. As the name suggests, geosynchronous means constant with the earth. This orbit appears constant when it is being viewed from the earth.
These orbits are placed at 35,786 km above the earth’s surface and is used extensively for monitoring weather as well as surveillance and satellite phones can work very well in these orbits.
Since a satellite orbit in geosynchronous orbits can cover a single patch of earth at all times, a satellite phone connected to a GEO can connect to the satellite and make a phone call. At least one satellite has the particular area covered and considering this, the chances of making a call are exceptionally high.
Low Earth Orbits (LEO)
Low Earth Orbits satellites are those placed at an altitude of 2000 km or less above the earth’s surface. They generally go around the earth every two hours, and their lower position means that the delay is less than 0.05 sec. Hence, they are used in applications like satellite phones where a delay could go on to become life threatening.
This is all for the basics of satellite phones. It is just a simple overview of how these wonderful devices work and the technology behind these devices.
Now we try to understand why have these phones not taken over the market and why are they so expensive?
I think I have answered my first question there. The main reason why satellite phones have not taken over the market is because of their exceptionally high cost. They are way too expensive than regular mobile phones. The average cost per minute via a satellite phone is somewhere between $0.15 to $2 per minute, which is super expensive. The initial cost of owning one of these bad boys is somewhere between $700 -$2500. There are three major companies that provide satellite communication services namely Iridium, Immersat and Globalstar. At the time of publishing, a global coverage providing, omnidirectional satellite phone (Iridium Extreme) has a base price of $1,145. That is more expensive than the latest IPhone. You get the picture why they are not popular in the mainstream market.
Another reason why these phones are not very popular is that. they work only when there is a clear line of sight to the sky. Considering the number of devices active at any given time, line of sight is very difficult to achieve and the probability of interference also is pretty high. Their size also makes them not ideal, they are way bigger than the average mobile phone. They are a real hassle to carry around everyday.
Now to address the second part of the question, Why are these satellite phones so damn expensive. The first reason is the satellite themselves. It is a very expensive task to launch a satellite into orbit and bandwidth in the L – band is very expensive, and satellite phone companies have to pay a huge premium to get a small portion of the bandwidth.
One important reason for the high cost of satellite phones is also due to fact that they are not easy to monitor and governments do not like any communication devices that they can not monitor easily.
So that is all I have to say today. I believe I did an alright job of explaining one or two things about satellite phones, their uses and their cost. I firmly believe that once the number of satellite increases, the cost of satellites will decrease and we will see more of them in use. But, they will not be a replacement for cellular phones but a worthy supplement and a lifesaver at times.
During my sophomore year in university studying electronics engineering, I had this insane desire to create circuits and sensors that would completely revolutionize the way farming was done. That might been a real goal, or a result of me drinking seven days a week for a semester straight, only god knows, but it was a pretty good goal. Me, and four of my mates ended up building a soil moisture sensor, which was pretty cool. However, due to a myriad of reasons, nothing ever happened of that project. The quest to find new ways and technologies, that might improve farming and agriculture as a whole has never left me. As a matter of fact, I still find myself reading a lot of papers and articles on technology in agriculture. Among the things I have read in the past five years, there has been a topic that has captured my interest. Vertical Farming. Today, we will look at vertical farming, see the benefits it offers, the challenges to implement vertical farming, its current condition and the overall possibilities it presents.
Simply put, vertical farming is a way to grow crops on vertically stacked layers. This method can be employed anywhere and everywhere where the environment can be controlled. The environmental factors like nutrients, temperature and light are all controlled and balanced to an optimal level. For the most part, land and soil are not required and huge amount of sensors and actuators are employed to collect data about the crops
There are mainly three different methods of vertical farming. Let us briefly understand each of them.
Hydroponics – This method of vertical farming is completely soil less. The plants have their roots soaked in a nutrient solution. The solution has to be frequently monitored and the contents updated so that the plants get their necessary nutrients. The nutrients can be generated from a variety of sources, including fish excrement, duck manure, chemical fertilizers and even artificial nutrient solutions. Hydroponics is mostly suitable for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuces and even marijuana. The major advantages of hydroponics include being able to grow large amount of food in a small space, allows the reuse and recycle of water, and most importantly it only requires 20 % of water to grow same volume compared to traditional agriculture. There are some disadvantages to it as well. Putting together a hydroponic system is not cheap and you need to be an expert to set it up. But, it has more advantages than disadvantages.
Aeroponics- Aeroponics is the process of growing food (plants) in air or mist without the use of soil or an aggregate. It was NASA, who initially came up with the idea of aeroponics. The basic principle of aeroponic growing is to grow plants suspended in a closed environment by spraying the plant’s dangling roots with a sprayed nutrient solution. Aeroponics are the most effective method of vertical farming and it has been seen that the plants grown via aeroponics are much richer in nutrition than the other two methods.
Aeroponics
Aeroponics offers substantial advantages compared to other methods. Plants get maximum nutrients from aeroponic system, and since they are exposed to oxygen all the time, fast growing plants can grow rapidly. As said above it uses the least amount of water and provides plants with high nutritional value.
Aquaponics- This is the most bizarre form of vertical farming. I say bizarre because it combines fishes and plants in the same ecosystem. Fishes are reared in an indoor pond and their waste is used as feed/ sources for the plants. Plants have the ability to purify wastewater, that can be reused to fish ponds. Aquaponics is by far the most green method of vertical farming and can really be a great economic solution as both fishes and plants can flourish.
Aquaponic Farming
Now that, we know a thing or two about the types of vertical farming, let us see the benefits it provides.
It is easy and possible to produce food all year round as long as the environmental conditions are satisfied.
The uses of fossil fuels are reduced significantly.
The crops are mostly indoors, so completely weather proof.
It requires significantly less area to produce same number of crops as we’d do in traditional farming.
It produces the methane gas that can be used as an energy source.
Not everything is all rosy and we still have significant drawbacks, that can make vertical farming not as lucrative. Here are a few things that are still major hindrances.
Like every other sustainable technology, the initial cost of installation is huge. There is profit to be made in this field, but one must play the long game. This detracts the investors to a large degree.
Sensors and transducers are employed in extremely large amounts to collect data about the yield. One thing you can be surie about electronics it that they break often. This can lead to faulty data generation. Regular monitoring and extreme sensitivity has to be observed while installing these sensors.
The amount of crops we can actually produce indoors is very minimal. That is a problem.
Possibilites
I firmly believe that vertical farming has a very bright future. From abandoned buildings to unused shipping containers, anything can be used to grow food. The agricultural lands are not getting any larger and the population of the world is not getting any smaller, so we may not have a choice in the matter but to resort to vertical farming.
Robots and automation will be key in determining how far vertical farming can go. If a robot can distinguish the differences between plants and be able to determine the amount of nutrients each plant may require, we can really take vertical farming to a different level. This level of technology is still many years, if not decades away.
Another thing that can be done is build small scale farms in different places throughout the world, to a scale that can be managed by individuals or a small group of people. It is very expensive to build a high tech vertical farms, but it is certainly possible to grow food to feed a family of five in a shipping container that is just lying there in the yard. Incentives and encouragement should be provided to locals who are trying to become self sufficient.
Conclusion
Vertical farming might be the answer to solving a lot of food related problems, but that is still a long way away. The concept is still in its infancy and it could eventually go on to become the technology that might change the way we grow our food. The results are promising but we have a long road ahead of us. As far as I am concerned, the only way is up.
“Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything” – Hector MacDonald.
Statistics is a very powerful tool, one that is used in anything and everything. The scope of statistics is unlimited and it can be used to a person or a company’s advantage. Today, we take a look at how data and statistics can be used to manipulate the gullible and how we have all fallen for it. After all, the numbers don’t lie, or do they?
Before I dive into the categories and types of data misuse (Yes, this is a separate field of study in itself), let me tell you why I wanted to write this article in the first place. Throughout this COVID-19 crisis, we see the data about number of tests conducted and the number of deaths, but it seems to me that we are not considering all the variables and our sample size is too small (especially for a country like Nepal), and the inference drawn could be wholly false, but that is something for a later date, when we will be able to investigate the truth behind the COVID-19 data. So, I will keep this paranoia to myself. Today we will just learn about how data and statistics are misused in the world that we live in. I would like to present these three examples initially and we will learn about the different types of misuse of statistics and data.
Example no 1
We have all heard about the average income of citizens in any given country. Imagine that the citizens have an average income of $34,567. What do you think of, when you read such a stat?
If you are like me you probably think that, the average Joe in that country makes $34,567, but you would be completely wrong. The average value can completely be skewed to one side by one extremely large or an extremely small value. Say, there are a hundred people in that country who make over a million dollars a year and ten people who make over ten million dollars. This gives a false indication on how much money an average person makes. To see how much the average Joe actually makes, one must look at the median values. Learn about the differences between mean and median here.
Example no 2
College
Suppose you are a recent high school graduate and wish to go to college. You have two options, College A and College B.
College A’s brochure states that the graduation rate for students from their college is 90 %, and College B’s brochure states the graduation rate to be 75%, you will immediately assume College A is better than College B, but let us say that College A has only 50 students and college B has 2000 students. Does the argument still hold? Sometimes it may and sometimes it may not. Before inferring from any statistical data, we as conscious readers must be sure about the sample size.
Example no 3
You definitely have seen or heard the infamous Colgate advertisement. “More than 80 % of the world’s dentist recommend Colgate”, time and time again. This implies that 80% of dentists choose Colgate over any other brand. This could not be further from the truth. The survey asked the dentists to choose a number of brands, not just one and Colgate happened to be in that group recommended by the majority of dentists, along with other brands like Pepsodent. This is a classic case of not being transparent with numbers and torturing data to paint a picture of something that it is not.
Now that we are aware of what we are dealing with, let us get into some types of statistics misuse and see how they are used to manipulate us, and what we can do to not get swayed by these false data. OK, let’s get right into it.
1. Discarding Unfavorable Data
Discarding Unfavorable Data is one of the most common methods of misuse of statistics. This is the act of drawing inferences from a small number of sample, that seem to confirm a predisposed idea or position, while suppressing the information or the sample that may indicate otherwise. This is generally done to prove a false positive and change the narrative of a statistical study.
An Example
Assume that, an election will take place in less than three months. A journalist from a channel that endorses one kind of political agenda visits a neighborhood and takes public opinion on where the voters stand, but he only interviews the section of population that supports the channel’s agenda.
He will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that, the public in general favors a single candidate and his employers will try to hammer that flawed statistic as “truth”, to the unsuspecting public.
2. Over-generalization and Oversimplification
This happens everyday, and not just in statistics. Humans have a tendency of grouping people and things on the categories we have held in our minds. Just by looking at a person, we try to put them in categories like rich or poor, good or bad, Hindu or Muslim and so on. While generalization and simplification can be useful and is necessary to some extent, it has the potential to be detrimental and extremely misleading if used incorrectly. This is specially true when data or statistic about one population sample is used to prove characteristics of another sample.
An Example
A study shows that in a particular town, all males aged 18-60 are smokers. The study surveyed 10,000 males and inferred the conclusion. But, what the study failed to include was the town was a popular tourist destination and the survey was conducted during the peak tourist season. As a result, most of the sample size were the tourists, and the conclusion drawn did not represent the local population. But, if you look at the numbers, a decent sample size has been studied and survey has been conducted using all the standard procedures, and it is difficult to find a flaw in the study unless you look closely. This is an example of over- generalization.
3. Faulty Polling
What questions you ask to accumulate data, will skew the data significantly. This is best illustrated with an example.
An Example: Look at these two questions
Do you agree with government’s policy to increase taxes to fund for new hydro-power projects?
Do you think that government should not invest towards building new hydro-power projects?
The above questions will produce two different types of answers. Though the questions presented mean exactly the same thing, the responses will not be the same. The first question will get a lot of negative responses, the second will encourage the government to continue further investments. This is how faulty polling can used to change the responses and yield a false result.
4. Flawed Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation. Flawed correlations are most common in social media where some “experts” try to find correlation between things that baffle the public. Some of them are absolutely hilarious, while some are much more conniving and deceitful. Let us look at a hilarious example of this.
This article appeared on Forbes in 2012, and is one of the most hilarious pieces of correlation does not equal causation. Since, 1820 the number of pirates has decreased significantly, and the temperature of earth has also increased. The graph is there for all to see. So, if you want to save the environment, become a pirate.
5. Sampling Bias
Sampling bias means that the samples of a particular population are collected in such a way that they do not represent the true distributions due to non-random reasons.
The major cause of sampling bias is the design of the study itself, that may favor or disregard data collected from certain sources. Faulty Polling is responsible for sampling bias to a large extent.
Sampling Bias is mostly prevalent in the scientific arena where a sample yielding negative or unfavorable responses is conveniently discarded to “confirm a false positive.” I will present a real example here
A brilliant article appeared on Futurism.com on August 13, 2015, titled “Sampling Bias in Science: Here’s Why You Need to Go Back to the Source“. That article highlighted two studies that appeared on Discovery and CNN. The studies concluded that 8 out of 10 adults had indulged in sexting. That is an alarming statistic, and can put the privacy of a large number of people at risk. But, was the survey accurate? Lets go to the source and find out.
Total Respondents: 870 Demographic: United States, aged 18 to 82, heterosexual, 58% female, 81% white.
Additionally they had to be the members of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers meaning that these people knew the internet and were more likely to indulge in sexting than the average Joe. So, this study is a controlled experiment which is worthless when you apply it to the larger population. The inferences drawn are always incorrect.
6. Data Dredging
You may have heard about it as data snooping, or data fishing. It is the act of misusing data analysis to find data patterns that when presented as statistically significant, can lead to a large number of false positives and false negatives.
This practice involves the analysis of large volumes of data for the purpose of discovering relationships between data points, without a clear hypothesis.
This is an unethical and immoral practice which generates “important conclusions”, that have ZERO real world evidence to back it up.
“For example, a drug company might spend millions of dollars on a drug but it may not show the kind of results that were initially expected. However, it needs to market the drug in order to make profits from it. Therefore the company uses data snooping to project claims that are not actually true, even though the data confirms the claim. This is done by taking a representative sample and collecting huge number of parameters related to the test subjects, so that the drug can be claimed and correlated to the problem in some form or the other.Data fishing can also be done by narrowing down the sample size to include those results that bear out the intended hypothesis. Thus the drug might be tested on 1000 patients and the results might not show a statistically significant positive result for a given problem. However, by narrowing down the study to 500 people and using a selection bias towards those who showed favorable results by using the drug, the company can claim something that is not actually true.“
So, those were some ways in which statistics can be used to manipulate the general public. While it may be impossible to avoid them, it is certainly possible to safeguard ourselves from being the victims of tortured data.
Always look at the sample size- The larger the sample size, the more chances of the study being true. Make sure this criteria is met in the study presented to you.
Make sure the population is well represented- When you hear something like “20,000 people agree that the mayor needs to go.”, make sure that the voices are not just from one group of people that are against the ruling party, and also make sure it is not 20000 out of 2 million people.
Question the validity of everything you read.
Conclusion
We are in the midst of a pandemic and the chances of us being fed the wrong statistics to make us feel a certain way is very high. Let us stay vigilant and question the validity of everything and try to find out for ourselves, if the data presented to us is actually true. That is all I have to say. See you on the next post.
STEM HISTORY 
